Last Known Issue Volume I Issue 6
Are you leveraging technology to run in the right direction?
Yesterday I finally fulfilled my new years resolution and ran in the Blackmores Running Festival (Bridge Run).
About 35,000 people participated in the annual event and if like me, you haven’t been involved in an event of this scale before you’d be forgiven for wondering how on earth you can organise thousands of people to run at the same time in the same place. Leaving aside the operational requirements, volunteers, transportation and safety concerns I used what mental energy I had left to think about ways we can use technology to coordinate and organise our business enquiries.
Divide Key Participants into Categories Here’s how they do it: The organisers of the event divide participants into groups. A, B, C and a special category for those who think they might win it get to run up front. Each participant is then given a special chip which you tie to your shoelace. The chip tracks your location and time. Pretty cool organisation and use of technology.
It got me thinking. Are we leveraging our technology enough? Could companies divide enquries and correspondence into manageable, visible categories?
Perhaps Public Folders? In Microsoft Exchange, a product that most businesses are running if they have a server or have hosted email there is a feature called Public Folders. Think of these folders like buckets where you can easily direct multiple people to look at emails, notes and other information.
About 3 years ago at I Know IT we set up 3 distinct Public Folders: Support. Sales and Faxes (for our electronic faxes).
Ás an IT support provider it’s likely that what is important correspondence to us is different to your business so below are some examples I’ve put together that might be relevant to you.
Perhaps you’re already using a similar method or have evolved to a CRM system like we recently have, but if not – ask yourself ” what are the regular types of correspondence we receive?”.
-Sales enquiries
-Confirmation receipts ie delivery confirmation
-Status requests
-Tender responses
-Accounts payable and accounts receivable
Before we made the shift to using Public Folders it was a bit like those 35,000 participants running in different directions. We constantly ran the risk of losing important customer requests – and occasionally we’d trip over particularly if a team member was away or the sender ‘cc’d the whole team so assumptions were often made as to who was following up the request.
By grouping our enquiries, we were able to consistently run the same race.
Education can be trickier than the technology Sure, this didn’t occur overnight. For some weeks we embarked on an educational journey to make sure we informed everybody we knew how to contact us – a little like changing address and phone number, we had a few stragglers but because our team were committed to eradicating lost enquiries they would ‘drag and drop’ any straggling emails into the right folder for the rest of the team to share.
Perhaps it’s frequent communication from one of your suppliers, or perhaps you or another person in your company are responsible for a single email address, think of what might happens when you or your colleague go to lunch or go on leave? Would it be more effective if multiple people could access that “bucket” ?
Once you’ve made your list you can start to create Public Folders to be shared amongst team members.
A small word of advice – As tempting as it might be, try not to go too crazy creating lots of Public Folders . If you or your colleagues need to check 20 different places for emails there’s an even higher likelihood of losing information and creating panic.
We found by assigning 1 or more people responsible for checking those Public Folders each day and distributing the emails to an available or appropriate person was an absolute life saver but once that person has to handle more than 3 folders it can get a little bit frustrating. You can group items together i.e. all sales enquiries and quote requests go to one folder.
If you need help setting up Public Folders or you think you’re ready to evolve to something like CRM (a whole other article if you’re not familiar with this technology) please let me know. I’m happy to discuss it further.
[...] competitors has never been more possible or more critical than it is right now. In a recent article “Running in the Right Direction” I eluded to using Public Folders to funnel communications to a specific person or team as a simple [...]
James, great article. Particularly like the wisdom in not going crazy with a good process. Always have to face the Brutal Facts.